Personnel recovery has become an increasingly important mission area. Military planning options for recent world events have included deployment of combat search and rescue forces. In each instance, recovery assets were among the first to arrive for support of combat operations.
The USAF (United States Air Force) has been designated by the United States Department of Defense as the lead service for Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR). To meet the requirements of a lead service, the Air Force has equipped and trained specialized rescue forces to conduct CSAR.
The primary operational task of CSAR is to locate, contact, and recover downed aircrews. This primary task may be broken into three sub-tasks. The first sub-task includes locating the aircrew by visual or electronic search methods to pinpoint the aircrew's location and permit recovery. The second sub-task includes communicating with the downed aircrew by radio or visual signaling to conduct authentication. The third sub-task includes recovering the downed aircrew to return them to friendly control and, if necessary, providing medical assistance.
Additional, non-rescue specific, operational tasks that must be completed to accomplish the primary rescue task include: (1) provide personnel and equipment to train rescue mission ready personnel, (2) operate efficiently during peacetime, (3) airdrop rescue personnel and equipment, (4) configure rescue equipment for deployment, (5) provide self-protection for rescue assets, (6) conduct medical evacuation operations, (7) provide intelligence support directly to the rescue aircrew, (8) respond and prepare for rescue mission execution, (9) control alert and execute airborne rescue missions, and (10) support rescue sortie production.
The environments that rescue assets operate within can be adjusted by the use of supporting aircraft. Supporting aircraft providing air-to-air, air-to-ground, and Suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD) coverage can degrade the threat, either temporarily or permanently, permitting rescue assets to enter the area and execute the recovery. Rescue forces may be augmented by these supporting systems depending on the threat environment, distance to the downed aircrew, and availability of assets.
A downed aircrew member's chance of survival diminishes rapidly after thirty minutes of being on the ground. Often the aircrew is injured and defenseless with limited communications capabilities. Currently, information distribution about a downed aircraft is relatively slow (in comparison to a networked approach) to filter through the command structure and reach an available asset that could recover the aircrew. Many times, a CSAR crew is standing by to respond to downed aircraft, but that particular CSAR asset may not be the closest asset to extract the downed aircrew. In some cases, ground troops or rotary wing aircraft in the area may provide emergency extraction without launching CSAR assets. However, due to interoperability issues, the ground or rotary wing assets may not be capable of communicating with the downed aircrew member. During training missions or low intensity conflicts, the CSAR assets may not be available for recovery and a “non standard” evacuation is necessary. Current survival radios require the user to load the current cryptographic keys into a radio and a prior knowledge of the channels used by adjacent units in the area.
Current survival systems used by the joint services are not network capable and rely on the downed aircrew member to establish communications with the CSAR elements via SATCOM (satellite communications), or for line of sight communications requires the cryptographic keys for that particular battle space and the specific channel being utilized by the unit in the area.
Therefore, it would be desirable to allow an aircrew to connect to a network centric combat search and rescue radio in an aircraft where the aircraft provides cryptographic keying and ensures the radio is prepared to communicate with the integrated network at any time.